The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric

Schmidt Number: S-3439

On-line since: 15th April, 2004

XII

Individual
Spirit Beings and the Undivided Foundation of the World: Part 3

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual
observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this
or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have
been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts,
experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought
him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help
him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into
my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November
21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman —
it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front
of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the
title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He
is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He
is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article
that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the
course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the
following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things
has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it
is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and
comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great
Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so
that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has
primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To
experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of
life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a
cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to
arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to
correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before
you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the
process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is
shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that
undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the
senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these
washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol
of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In
this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with
rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these
sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of
Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as
something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that
is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding
one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path
on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something
that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely
hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances;
such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that
from some direction someone has again observed that something lies
behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very
harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones
who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They
even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter
the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are
altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that
requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really
break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up
with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that
healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to
speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic
feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are
demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to
humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here
that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be
spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference
between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which
has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold
of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached
the present, thousands of congresses can be held — world
congresses and national congresses, and whatever — thousands of
societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands
of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless
the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through
them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real
exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be
said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad
public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of
Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in
calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order.
Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure.
Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually
alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in
this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full
consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of
greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic
feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,”
or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to
reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their
formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to
these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish
to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify”
ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we
wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential
for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a
special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in
a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed
this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the
following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual
etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to
your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to
solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods,
allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how
man must be brought into connection with what must become more and
more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago
to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain
portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show
how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to
extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example
of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer
tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For
this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection
actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human
energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by
fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things
will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with
is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to
people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of
earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of
human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings
who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical
sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this
case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one
tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of
earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the
mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the
remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in
public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human
being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two
occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our
nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying
away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be
established between these forces dying within man, which are related
to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces.
Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able
to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto
undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces
that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first
problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which
will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem
consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances.
This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a
sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The
time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile
enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will
become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things,
caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these
caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is
attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the
other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into
the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I
have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in
the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding
conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these
things indicate to us that something most significant is in the
process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it
that people who know about these things in the right sense do not
apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is
involved in this application and which forces are still actively
hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or
spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today
than to talk about these things, until people have enough
understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a
selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do
this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do.
These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a
deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is
willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate,
practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one
can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind
the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The
proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at
times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part
groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection
with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better
informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from
the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things;
they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law
that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of
waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in
regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of
spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth
century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual
for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One
must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself
to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that
the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part
in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one
will not understand the events that take place around us unless one
accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain
egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is
active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies.
First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede
within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such
misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge
had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have
the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of
observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on
himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it
was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and
later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of
evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have
entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them
falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas
Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them
correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that
are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are
exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that
were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more
materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought
at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes
that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the
Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete.
This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the
possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more
materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to
put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which
they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and
death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp
the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that
time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity
speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God
through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something
purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern
humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even
immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I
spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science
that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about
immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is
only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such
matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still
preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to
apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a
certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be
pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public,
from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue
or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way.
It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all
of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For
themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract
formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more
concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the
initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and
one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the
mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the
earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most
significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same
relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of
God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this
mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of
the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real
cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic
understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes
to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops,
he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on
earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as
what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however.
It will be discovered — and certain circles are coming close to
this in their discoveries — that the active forces are not in
what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what
streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos.
When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in
which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all
directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes
place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon
which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today
that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let
us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the
biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg
grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to
grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does
not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the
forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the
ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist
today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the
microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees
depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the
stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one
discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality:
it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the
mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of
gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the
course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue
is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors
to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a
connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through
acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one
learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of
the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and
illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science
of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however,
on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man
becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through
which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper
under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You
can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups
of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold
this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and
one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One
does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only
introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market
for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus
bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended
materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are
hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that
there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will
penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction
to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This
problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the
same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of
course, attain through this what is often speculated as being
immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares
oneself — so long as it is impossible to influence the physical
body to prolong life artificially — to undergo soul experiences
that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even
after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's
disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these
circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not
know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time
provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the
title,
The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens).
These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning.
What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for
the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually
possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if
one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into
concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits
in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great
problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a
washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of
Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many — and
unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense — as cosmic
knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes
occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as
the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely
in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered
of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of
special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to
have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact
laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become
spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a
certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one
allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced
by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence
from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such
processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take
place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the
materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so
on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange
must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence.
This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for
example — when it is a matter of the good that is to be
attained in the future — certain processes take place in the
morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes
through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically
until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a
manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the
day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To
achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a
position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk
about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold,
health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality,
the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and
evening but with something totally different. I called to your
attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was
to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from
the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the
Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be
paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ
appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead
of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially
through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with
these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit
electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence
over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called
the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be
penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the
magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use
of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work
spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth
and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the
line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it
does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.)
From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly
at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of
earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from
the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism,
one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring
about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in
relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It
will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these
things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of
strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and
actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are
placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will
arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human
science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways.
It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain
cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic
streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams
will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to
discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the
direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in
the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how,
from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can
be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the
direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of
Virgo.

Diagram 10Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism
of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern
themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the
spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos — with help from
the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative —
emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday.
It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with
the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that,
behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are
hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be
won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze
it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream
toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at
the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all
wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting
the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the
human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just
as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human
being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a
centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity
is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation
of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism
of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the
egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also
to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth
post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to
use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to
master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or
simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal
to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not
be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the
knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of
the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the
midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening
processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used.
Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical
attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances
will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with
morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes.
It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way
upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality — gold,
health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from
Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything
harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense
loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way
found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The
cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget
strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from
work, because they will have within them a certain force of
intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to
concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate
from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not
exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is
necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking
realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception
of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is
important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as
they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality
the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically
oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for
the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what
matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through
man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided
from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to
work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from
the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in
an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route
through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way
that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will
continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine.
The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous
route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing
inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary
forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to
renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From
the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves
into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian
theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force,
as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot
exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you
will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build
a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above
all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult
times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you
observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In
our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations
of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which
one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely
different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over
the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain
human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there
to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that
were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by
certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of
an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain
a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end
of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to
each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at
the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new
age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively
are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The
representatives of the old impulses — still of the eighteenth,
seventeenth, sixteenth centuries — must therefore be harnessed
to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain
group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the
new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the
economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is
only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely
different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all
my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is
involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the
earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one
points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in
the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth,
sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself
in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle
that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much
power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as
possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow
themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by
maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a
war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is
nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with
entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true
realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is
only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in
the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in
the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at
least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then
the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be
dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things
as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have
developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the
course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely
incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made
in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil” —
he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson —
it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate
the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy
and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be
able above all to reflect today about the significance of
constellations in something that is at work and the significance of
individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies
something completely different from what lies behind the mere
constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much
would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting
in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that
this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its
individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically — I will
not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never
occur to me to do that in such a neutral country — but
independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to
the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value
because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular
spiritual soul force — does it thereby have a spiritual weight
in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight
— or does this brain actually have no more value than would
show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight?
In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I
presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the
point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value
to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale,
because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it
to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being
grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be
something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy
stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters
about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this
wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the
extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that
undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the
senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things
that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective
only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as
practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your
own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in
many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of
gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the
Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.